Category Archives: Nicole Blaisdell Ivey photographs

Photographing Kristin Diener’s stunning art jewelry on these wonderful human beings was both mesmerizing and fantastic. To see more treasures follow the link to Kristin Diener *studio jewelry photographs by Margot Geist

The Living Batch, one of the oldest bookstores in New Mexico, is closing next month, after being in business on the same block for 27 years.

On Dec. 24 it will shut its doors at 106 Cornell SE, which is next door to the Frontier restaurant.

“The main reason we’re closing is that I don’t want to do it any more,” said owner Gus Blaisdell, a parttime film instructor at the University of New Mexico.

But that decision is influenced by several factors.

One is the arrival of the mega-bookstores in the Northeast Heights.

Their immediate effect is that a variety of customers no longer shop at the Living Batch.

“Before the superstores, we discovered that the most interesting sale days in our store were weekends. People drove from all over the city to come and shop,” Blaisdell said.

Another factor is his disenchantment with mainstream publishing.

“The price of books is excluding young readers,” he said, noting that three hardback books can retail for as much as $100.

Blaisdell said he’s considered, and rejected, the notion of reducing the store’s space and narrowing the subjects to what the Living Batch specializes in — alternative fiction, poetry, politics, art and architecture, psychoanalysis and works from small presses.

If the store changed its direction and size, Blaisdell said, there probably wouldn’t be sufficient readers to buy books “in these prices, in these times in Albuquerque.”

In addition, he said, none of his children nor present or former employees expressed interest in maintaining the bookstore.

“A literary period of mass readership for the small bookstore is passing out of democratic politics,” Blaisdell said. “I think inexpensive books should be available to a large number of people, if they want to read.

I recently came across Ken Fields fine essay, Winters’s Wild West, in the Los Angeles Review of Books – http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/winterss-wild-west/ – a tribute to his mentor and friend, the poet and critic, Yvor Winters. Ken’s essay is rich in history, detail, and poetry, and it paints a clear portrait of Winters in his place and time. While reading it I was reminded of my late father. The bit below is taken from my chronology in Gus Blaisdell Collected.

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In November (1966), while at UNM Press, Gus receives a telegram saying that his publishing mentor and friend, Alan Swallow, has died of a heart attack at his typewriter. Gus writes a short tribute, “Bio of a Swallow,” and publishes it in the Winter issue of New Mexico Quarterly along with Alan’s autobiographical essay, “Story of a Publisher”.

In a letter, Gus writes, “I began commuting to Denver on weekends to help with running Swallow Press and it happened that my great teacher Yvor Winters’ last two books, Forms of Discovery and its companion anthology, Quest for Reality, were mine to design and edit.” In a letter to one of the lawyers during the chaos after Alan’s death, Winters writes that, “Gus Blaisdell undertook this job with no payment from the company and at considerable financial sacrifice to himself. He has done this out of admiration for Alan and myself and out of loyalty to Mae [Alan Swallow’s wife].” Gus also refused Winters’ offer of payment.

To Swallow’s wife Winter’s writes that “Alan was an odd genius. . . . He had a gift which is restricted usually to good poets: He could recognize good writing and recognize it at once (he recognized the same gift in Gus, and so do I). It was this that made him a success as a publisher, this plus the energy of three bull-mastiffs. He was almost ready to take Gus on, before he died, as a junior partner; but he had been a lone wolf for so long that he couldn’t bring himself to it.”

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In November of 2000, Ken Fields and committee invited Gus to be one of the speakers at the Symposium in honor of Yvor Winters’ Centenary at Stanford University. Yvor Winters was a mentor to Gus and helped him in many ways. Gus was happy to be invited for the symposium. He said it felt like coming full circle. One morning, as I sat sipping tea across from my father at his glass and steel dining room table, he handed me an early draft of his Winters address to read. In a few weeks I would move from his beloved New Mexico to Montana. He had only recently started giving me his work in progress to read. He gave it to very few people. So, this was an occasion. And as I sat reading this address he’d written to honor his mentor, I cried. In the essay I learned much about my father that I’d never known. I cried because I was moving away from my intellectual touchstone, my mentor. I cried for reasons I did not fully understand. After reading Ken’s essay on Winters it sent me back to reread Gus’s tribute to Winters in GUS BLAISDELL Collected. When I came to Winters’ poem, “At the San Francisco Airport”, what struck me on this reading that hadn’t struck me so consciously before was that Winters’ was saying goodbye to his daughter, as my father, not a man known for outright expressions of love or emotion, by giving me his Winters tribute to read, was saying goodbye to me.

An Excerpt from Gus’s tribute

What Was Called
“A Thought Echoed in Sight”
An address to the symposium in honor of Yvor Winters’
Centenary, Stanford University, November 16–18, 2000
■
For several years I have started all my film classes at the University of New
Mexico with a screening of Chris Marker’s masterpiece La Jetée. The
movie is twenty-eight minutes long, made almost entirely of still images—
except for a single sequence of a woman, after love, sleeping in bed. She
opens her eyes and blinks three times directly at her (offscreen) beloved,
her watching beholder; at us. When this point arises in the conversation
with the class I read them the first of two poems, William Blake’s “Several
Questions Answered”:
What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women in men do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
I tell the class that “lineaments” for Blake are the boundaries of the soul,
and that “gratified,” as opposed to “satisfied,” desire requires a thankfulness,
a thoughtfulness of two, and that it is genderless. My young are not
taught “corrosion and distrust”—and neither were Yvor Winters’ young.
[Stanley Cavell, in The Claim of Reason, offers this gloss on Blake’s rhyme:
“Here is a brave acceptance of the sufficiency of human finitude, an achievement
of the complete disappearance of its disappointment, in oneself and in
others, an acknowledgment of satisfaction and of reciprocity.”]

When the conversation has ended or the class is coming to an end I
read my second poem to them, Winters’ “At the San Francisco Airport.”
Sometimes I read it twice, particularly the last stanza in which Winters bids
farewell to his departing daughter:

This is the terminal, the break.
Beyond this point, on lines of air,
You take the way that you must take;
And I remain in light and stare—
In light, and nothing else, awake.

Some students always come up after class wanting to know more about
the poet who wrote the last poem. My several tattered paperbacks of the
Collected Poems testify to their avidity.
Awake and in light. Heraclitus said that “the waking have one and the
same world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” But
Arthur is awake and alone, his daughter speeding away “on lines of air,” on
her own separate course, leaving him to remain in light and awareness of
the terminal break.

I saw Constance DeJong’s first show of metal paintings and drawings in 1980. I was
immediately impressed, found the subsequent work equally distinguished, and was an
ardent fan until DeJong went underground in 1997. Then she surfaced again this year
with work so remarkably different that l was again struck. What had happened in the
years she had not shown? She had transformed her work, even though presently she is
again working in metal, and not just in terms of materials. There was a new, deepened
center of attention and concentration. What follows is a conversation between the two of
us that concentrates on her work out of the public eye from 1997 to the present. We talk
a bit about zazen, what DeJong calls sitting practice. This is a practice like yoga that
frees the mind for attention and concentration. Like yoga, the sitting practice is
religiously neutral. DeJong is not a Buddhist artist and she does not make Buddhist art,
whatever that might be. As the reader will see DeJong’s awareness of what she does
and why she does it is articulate and intense. Attention is a direction of the soul. The
interviewer, happily, had little to do but listen, trying for the same attention as the artist
displayed.
Gus Blaisdell

Constance DeJong:What l have noticed about this extended period of art making is that it is likebreathing, expanding and contracting. The dark gray steel expanding into coloredaluminum and the aluminum contracting back to black. The Copper Drawingsexpanding into complexity and contracting back to simplicity. The Black Workexpanding into high relief and back to extremely low relief The Light Drawingsexpanding into complexity and relief and contracting into the Rods with simplelow relief.

Color continually shifted back and forth between each series, from the dark greyof steel to colored aluminum and then to black aluminum. Black in the sculpturesgave Way to color in the Sulfur Paintings, The Sulfur Paintings made way for theblackest Reliefs, which denied even a trace of raw (red) copper The Reliefs werefollowed by the grids, which contained and then relinquished colon After theReliefs came the muted color of the Light Drawings and from the Light Drawingsevolved the black and white Rods. From the Rods came the most colorful NitratePaintings followed by the somber Four/Three monoliths.I like the analogy to breathing. For one thing it precludes a hierarchy, a linearpattern, a beginning, a peak, and an ending. It assumes circularity. It suggests thatall time and all stages are equivalent.

Gus Blaisdell: The idea of breath, contraction and expansion is very tied into zazen?

It’s the cornerstone. At first l was interested in Zen as a field of knowledge andway of seeing. Then it became just meditation practice itself.

And what is that?

It’s a practice that brings you into contact with what’s real. It’s not spiritual anddefinitely not religious. It’s a way to see through your thoughts, which are nonstopfictions, to what is actually occurring.

Like art, it’s a form illumination and self-realization. You’re always moving forward.It’s not creative in the same way art is out it is full of life in the way art is. It’s realand substantial in the way art is. But it is more of a deepening into the perfectionof the moment, of what already is. You don’t need to create anything. So I quitmaking art for a while.

But you never really quit anything. Like a jazz musician who retires from public
performing for a while to reshape his chops, you, as they say, went to the wood shed.

I started drawing, at first, as an extension of zazen. Since I was sitting and starringat nothing for long periods of time l decided to try meditating on an object, and Istarted with a leaf. After a while I started drawing it. I just started drawing what Isaw, what was in front of me, without the intention of trying to make a gooddrawing. It’s like when you are paying such close attention to something that youforget you are separate from that thing. What’s great about not doing Art is thatthen art has a chance. When you try to do something else very earnestly and thenthe drawing happens… that is interesting.

Do you associate this with the calligraphic tradition from the great Zen ink painters?Dipping mop in ink and lashing out this beautiful drawing and then sitting down again.

My drawing process is slower. That’s so perfectly spontaneous. Mine is steadier,more constant. It’s like slow motion. It’s a sequence in time instead of a burst ofspontaneous inspiration

Like the breath drawings of Gloria Graham? Turning the paper ninety degrees until she
reached the edge?

Yes, it’s a time sequence, a slower speed. But where her vision was within herbody l was making relationship with the external world, a specific object. But in asense it was the same because if you are really with one thing, you are witheverything, including yourself and your breath.

Of the drawings we are looking at, the second leaf is the most sensual.

That’s because it’s restrained. It’s quiet, but also charged.

It’s sort of swelling towards you, it’s opening out.

And the roses. I always draw them when they are closed, before they open up, thelight hits the bud, shapes the form. It’s just a good form. I would never draw a rosethat is opened. When it opens up it’s not as interesting-it’s too exposed, there’snothing hidden.

It is a singular, particular object that draws you in?

Yes. Every object l draw—each leaf, each pod-has to have a certain structure andsculptural quality. The mass, the line of the stem, the duality of color, subdued butrich, is important. The way the light hits the object has to articulate the mass andwarm the color. Then l can make a sculptural drawing.

I drew a leaf every day without worrying too much about the outcome of thedrawing. I practiced not thinking and it helped me to not see the leaf but to see thecolor and the tone and the line. I wasn’t concerned with how much like a leaf lcould make the drawing but with how faithfully I could render what l saw and howit felt.

Is the idea that now you have gotten the object back in front or you and it’s the real
object that was there all the time?

When I was in art school l refused—whenever I could get away with it—to drawfrom life. I thought it’s already there, so why copy it? It’s an object that’s in front ofyou. I used to think that if you didn’t make it up, it wasn’t art. Just copyingsomething was cheating. I didn’t consider the transformative aspect of theprocess.

Now I came at it from a different point of view. Drawing was now a handmaiden ofsitting. With drawing, I was investigating my relationship to the perceived world,rather than creating a new world.

In your earliest work, you were concerned with the sculptures as really being drawings
and paintings. Now you rediscover that drawing is sculptural. That’s fascinating. As
you’re going through certain dimensions and transforming them within yourself you
arrived at opposite conclusions. (When you look at these steel pieces) somebody could
say they were sculptures. You say they are paintings and that’s that! And now your
drawings are sculpture.

It’s also important that the materials they are made of express themselves asthemselves. Pencil is graphite and pastel is soft, pure pigment, and they must beas dominant as the object rendered. As I make the image on a flat surface, layersof charcoal and pastel build up and then l tilt the drawing board straight up andallow the extraneous chalk to fall. As it does, I press the chalk into the paper to‘catch’ the gravitational pull on the material making gravity and the weight of thepigment manifest in the drawing. I want to ground the work in its component parts—what it’s made of. In doing so, the drawing process is equal to the drawn object.Drawing is magic: to make marks on a flat surface that transform into a sculpturalpresence… for a sculptor that is magic. You just do what’s in front of you. Youcopy form, color, and light not paying too much attention to the concept of theform. It’s just a gray shape or a dark line. It’s color as color and not part of a leaf.Then you step back and recognize that it is a leaf. Magic! That may sound naïve,but I think that’s okay in art.

You should always be a beginner in art.

Recently you showed some work that is almost invisible.

Yes, and it happened almost by accident, as a result of letting go of certain studiopractices. I’ve always had a romance with the idea of a painter working directlyfrom or with nature, free of the studio. Sculptors, you know are pretty much tied totheir machinery and equipment.

I began to forage outside for material to draw and cast into metal. That provided away to extend the studio, and got me just plain outdoors.

These sculptures on opposite walls are of grasses, grasses that almost disappear. This
is the next thing shown after the nitrate painting.

I brought back a few things from a field that were extremely tiny and fragile. l wascollecting objects in nature that l was going to cast in metal, which I did. Littlepods, small sculptural objects, little prickly things, stems and things I found onthe ground. I cast them but I never ended up doing anything with them becausethey never got beyond what they were.

Fragile grass, which absolutely could never be cast, surfaced in this bag of stuffthat I was collecting. I put it on my table and kept looking at it, knowing that it wassomething I wasn’t going to cast in metal but noticing how the light was hitting itas it sat on my table casting shadows. It reminded me of my metal light drawings.They had a similar geometry and structure, and they were doing what the lightdrawings were doing, which was creating linear patterns on surfaces. I made atiny silver holder for the stem and pinned that through sand colored paper. Whenthey were hung on the wall the grasses disappeared. All you could see was theshadow of the grass.

The strange thing is as you approach you think they are floaters inside your own eyes
and then you get close and there is shadow and then they are gone.

You think, well it’s a tan piece of paper on the wall and maybe there are gnatsbuzzing around in front of the paper. When you approach it you slowly discoverwhat the work is. Elemental. You are in the work the whole time. People seemsurprised and happy when they discover what it is.

They were in an exhibition at the Fine Arts Museum in Santa Fe. The way theywere lit at the museum was exactly right. But then there was this out of control airconditioning that was creating a wind, not just a slight breeze. If you put a piece ofpaper on the floor it would blow away. So Ihad to nail the papers to the wall instead ofletting them float against the wall. The tradeoffwas that now the pieces were continuallyquivering in space and the halogen light wasquivering and they were actually better inthe museum than they were in the studio.They seriously disappeared and theyprojected this intense shadow at the sametime. They had the little geometries of theholder and the tiny buzzing activity of thesefuzzy particles like dust or flecks hoveringand spinning around this field.

Mites in front of your eyes?

Well, that takes retinal response to a newlevel. What l like about these is that theyappear to exist without the artist’s imprint.Which isn’t to say that I’m against the artist’ssignature. Vermeer was intentional; and llove his signature. But it is also wonderful inartwork when the artist isn’t in the work.That’s what’s happening in these. It’s justthe amazing structure and grace of thenatural world.

I once had an aquarium in my studio and in it I had these two beautiful fish that were
constantly chasing each other. They were really playful. I built an elaborate underwater
world for them with caves and tunnels and lots of plants. Every day I watched them and
one day I noticed something that looked like dust in a depression in the gravel. I studied
it, trying to figure out what it was. How could there be dust in water? All of a sudden I
recognized that it was a dozen tiny fish. I had never witnessed a birth of any kind before.
At that moment of recognition I was transfixed, so acutely present that I wasn‘t there. I
disintegrated with happiness. A moment of self-dissolution. That is what I have
experienced in sitting and that is what art can do. The grass pieces remind me of that
experience.

You recently told me about these four copper pieces on the wall. You said these pieces
had to do with the ever-changing flights of birds. And did you mention that you also
stopped sitting for a while in order to go out to see the daily flights?

As l came out of the Zendo one morning a flock of birds flew over l heard thembefore l saw them. They came in very low, right over my head. Then another flockand another l could see them from quite a distance so l had a good view of thecontinually changing shape of the flock. They were three-dimensional, kineticforms in space, hurtling towards me with chirping sounds. l began to make littleperforated metal pieces, which had a quality of flocks of tiny little birds. Of coursethey weren’t birds. They were holes. And they let light in. They became tiny lightobjects. They weren’t illustrations of what l had experienced with the birds, butthey had a sensibility parallel to the birds’ flight. The last thing l would do is to titlethem and give a reference to the birds.

Constructing and reducing, going for the essence and all of a sudden here you are with
these delicate copper pieces as a result of going outside and looking at moving things
and knowing that you can’t capture flights. But nonetheless here is this new form and
then it’s the piece itself.

It’s the piece itself, and it’s the light that informs it.

Light for you has always been a stabilizing force.

l discovered light in the copper drawings by scribling lines, which were intendedsimply to delineate one form from the other or one section within the drawingfrom another. Then when l held the drawing upright, and saw the shifting light, thelines jumped out. They reflected light or as you said, let the light out. Which is agreat way to understand that phenomenon. My work became more about lightonce l discovered light in the work. There is this going into the work and at thesame time the work coming towards you. That’s what l am interested in, that backand forth dialogue with the material itself. That’s why l don’t conceive work aheadof itself.

These little copper pieces are all about the light pouring down from above.

Light issuing from above informed a lot of the Black Work. But the way it is caughtand directed in these works is new.

Here’s what amazes me—from these little copper pieces, really small enough to hold in
your hand—intimate, private, only seen in the studio—and originally inspired by the
flights of birds—these little canopied copper pieces in which light pours from the holes in
the canopy above down to the sheet of copper below—from these little pieces about light
and flight you have gone on to create a monumental sculptural site with Antoine
Predock; hundreds of feet of copper, a monument that rises from bearms of prairie grass
and relates intimately to the sky above, and still somehow magically, at least for me, has
the intimacy of the little copper drawings. It is staggering. This new work is celestial,
cosmological, even ontological! Now that I’m done with my rapture let’s talk about this
project in some detail.

The structure holds celestial information in two ways. During the day the alcovewill filter constantly shifting sunlight through the canopy onto various metalplanes. The canopy will be perforated at thousands of points, which will replicateconstellation patterns and produce tiny spheres of light that will fall and settle inan indeterminate space. At the same time the reflection of this activity will multiplywarping the light from the initial into layered positions. The outer shell of thestructure will also be drilled to replicate stellar systems. During the day thiswill function graphically, charting the night sky with incised lines connectingparticular star groups. At night the drilled points will emit light recreating the nightsky as it appeared over a century ago from the vantage point of the site itself—45°7’ N, 93°38’ W elevation 848.

The fantasies of location like that exact position suggest that we can map everything;
create the celestial as well as the terrestrial sphere. For me, those coordinates are so
abstract they hang between the earth and the sky and are invisible. Does that make any
sense?

Notes on Remarriage Comedies aka comedies of equality or dailiness…

Classical comedy (cc) involves a young pair overcoming obstacles who get together for the first time. Ends in festival, feast, wedding; the old ratify the young, the young acknowledge the old, and society is assured of continuing.

Remarriage comedy (henceforth, rem.) involves an older pair, seeking a divorce, who end up getting back together, together again. Privacy (rem) is studied as opposed to the public ( classical comedy).

Freud asks, What does the woman want? Consider inflections: peevish, exasperated, impatient. Better, rephrase as, Given male desire is figured dramatically by the Oedipus complex, What is the form of female desire?

(Note. Freud argued that the Oedipus complex was universal, applying to humans regardless of sex. Questionable.)

Rem answers, what the woman wants is education. Education means leading out the best self, not indoctrination—seeking the attainable but as yet unattained self(of both). Who has education to give?

Men do, and the form this takes in rem is that the men endlessly lecture the women. (Possible shadow: the man could be pretending to provide education but really be [ seducing ] the woman, turning her into his private toy for his pleasure.) So the creation of the new woman is the business of men. But in truly transforming the woman the man must himself undergo change—such that the couple transformed is a new birth or vision of the human. That a man can walk in the direction of his dreams we all know; but that a woman can, and with the right man, is some of the news this genre brings.

This is accomplished in Cavell’s and Milton’s terms only through a meet and happy conversation, where “meet” means “just”: helpmeet, as in Genesis, not helpmate. These conversations (and lectures) take enormous amounts of time. The price for the woman is that no sense of “mother” applies to her: she is not one and her own is not present. (Sexuality between the two trying to divorce is a displaced issue; in cc it is central issue.)

Part of the change required of the man is humiliation. Essential to this is the fact of what I will call mutual forgiveness (a form of Gratified Desire?), acknowledgment.

The father is always on the side of the woman’s desire, unlike cc where he can be the first obstacle.

Since privacy is studied, often in a place of perspective called a green world, or in the rem genre, Connecticut; the marriage to work is beyond the sanction or church, state, or society. The real scandal is love, the outlaw status of its truth (p. 31) (Sherwood forest is a green world, as is Eden—to which we can’t quite return; and Shakespeare’s Arden). The feature of the green world allows the couple to feel that they have grown up together(p.31). An incestuous relationship is changed into one that can stand public scrutiny. Questioning this is one reason why Amanda Bonner takes their [private] marriage to court.

A constant threat to rem is that at any moment it can become melodrama. Adam’s Rib frames the Bonner’s marriage with the melodrama of the Attinger’s marriage. It is from Adam’s Rib that Cavell will derive the melodrama of the unknown woman.

It has been said that Gus Blaisdell—writer, philosopher, critic, and educator at the University of New Mexico—was a force of nature. His critical essays addressed photography, film, painting, and philosophy, among many other subjects. Blaisdell delighted in his friendships with celebrated figures in the arts and humanities, which included photographer Lewis Baltz, philosopher Stanley Cavell, writer Evan Connell, poet Robert Creeley, and art critic Max Kozloff. Blaisdell lived a life surrounded by books—he was a passionate reader, as well as being an editor, publisher, and a bookstore owner. Gus Blaisdell Collected (University of New Mexico Press, $40) is a sampling of his writings, selected and edited by William Peterson who writes “Gus’s writing revolved around the quest for knowledge of the self and the search for understanding our human placement in the world.” Of particular interest in this volume are his takes on Joel-Peter Witkin, Frank Stella, Lewis Baltz, and Allan Graham. About Blaisdell, critic Dave Hickey wrote, “Gus was the absolute, undeniable, real thing. One of the few.” This long-overdue book contains introductory essays by philosopher Stanley Cavell, literary critic David Morris, and an editor’s preface by Peterson, all of which gives the reader insight into the workings of the mind of this legendary figure. Guy Cross editor, publisher THE magazine